Middleware and Related Services (MARS) Platform Task Force (PTF)

Mission

To solicit, evaluate, and select specifications for recommendation to the Platform Technology Committee for adoption by the OMG (http://www.omg.org/) in the areas of:

Request Broker Technology - including but not limited to Object Request Brokers (CORBA), Message-Oriented Brokers and other technologies that are the target implementation contexts for Platform Independent Services and their Mappings.

General purpose Pervasive Services that are either:

Fundamental for developing useful distributed applications

Provide a universal basis for Application Integration and Information Integration, or

Support higher-level facilities and frameworks

Mappings for such Pervasive Services to specific middleware platforms, and reference mappings from generic PIM constructs to platform-specific constructs and protocol rules.

Co-Chairs

Working Groups (WGs)

To paraphrase the MARS home page, MARS hosts a number of WGs that serve as MARS' technology incubators. The members of a WG meet to explore specific technologies, e.g., prepare and review responses to RFIs, present their findings to the TF or as a published green papers, and prepare Draft RFPs. There are 3 active working groups at this time [★]:

High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) Working Group (Chartered March 2012)

Working from a roadmap for specifications to be developed (not just in MARS) to address the areas of policy based information exchange. Per this roadmap, two RFPs of three were issued. Of these two - one has since been withdrawn in deference to a new RFP issued in March 2014 to establish an IEF Reference Architecture (http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc.cgi?mars/2014-3-17). In any case, the IEF Policy Based Packaging Vocabulary (IEPPV) specification was adopted in December 2013 and formalized in May 2015 http://www.omg.org/spec/IEPPV/.

Rich Internet Application (RIA) Working Group (Chartered December 2009)

[★] The IDL Profiles Working Group hasn't met formally in a long time and is effectively done. However, it will remain in this list given how well it served its purpose.

News From Recent TC Meetings (and looking ahead)

Continuing and new Technology Processes

A significant milestone for MARS! As cited above, the IDL 4.0 RFC has been adoptedhttp://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?mars/15-03-01. IDL 4.0 is the culmination of an idea proposed in 2008: how to make it easier to apply IDL to more domains than just CORBA. The first step was to copy IDL from the CORBA spec and make it stand-alone: IDL 3.5 (http://www.omg.org/spec/IDL35/). The next step was to define a way to create Profiles of IDL (CORBA, DDS, etc). IDL 4.0 establishes a set of building blocks and annotations and defines how to use them to construct IDL profiles.http://www.omg.org/spec/IDL/

Three RFPs remain under discussion: one to extend the existing DDS Interoperability protocol to operate in Extremely Constrained Resource Environments (XRCE) and two to expand OMG's arsenal of IDL to language mappings (IDL to Java and IDL to C#).

Refer to the OMG Technical Meeting Resource Hub for the MARS report which provides more details on the work done in Cambridge and our plans for the meeting in La Jolla, CA (December 2015): http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?mars/2015-09-18 (OMG member only access).

Our meeting in La Jolla will include reviews of the three new RFPs as well as two revised submissions: IEF Reference Architecture and the Unified Component Model for Distributed Realtime Systems (UCM for DRE).

Documents Produced During Last Meeting

Coming improvement – one stop shop for all documents produced during the last meeting. Until then (or alternatively), go here: http://www.omg.org/members/cgi-bin/doclistm.cgi (member's only), select year and mars and then hit search. Resulting list will be displayed in reverse document number order.

MARS Technology Roadmap

The latest MARS Roadmap can be found at the MARS home page http://mars.omg.org. Two versions are posted:

A public version that requires no password to open. It provides links to issued RFPs, RFCs, and RFIs and adopted submissions (adopted during the current and previous year); all material available to the public. Published as a PDF file only.

A member's only version that needs a userid and password to access. Published in two formats: an editable Excel file and a nominally non-editable PDF file.

Reproduced below is the OMG technology process as captured in the MARS Roadmap.

As of December 2014, both include a Statistics tab, which contains graphical depictions of the Cumulative Technology Process State and MARS Technology Process State by Year. Both work with data recorded since November 2002 and are updated after each TC meeting.

Useful Links

MARS collaborates with a number of other Task Forces (C4I, Robotics, Systems Assurance, Government) and SIGs (DDS, Telecoms, Ontology). For example:

The IEF WG represents a collaboration between MARS and C4I with as needed involvement of Gov DTF and Ontology PSIG. IEF WG maintains an active dialog with Gov DTF's Info Sharing WG. As needed, the two WGs also meet jointly during the TC meeting week.

DDS PSIG serves as the incubator for the many DDS related technology processes handled by MARS and active in the IDL Profiles WG.

Any technology processes relating to security (e.g., DDS Security) are developed with input from and in collaboration with the Systems Assurance PTF.

Links to the respective home pages for these TFs and SIGs are provided below:

OMG Technical Meeting Resource Hub, an excellent resource for all Technical Committee (TC) reports and any special event presentations from previous and all past meetings (back to September 2003): http://www.omg.org/members/TMResourceHub/

Note that all these sites, except for the Meeting Resource hub, are public sites .. no password required to access.